Server

Linux server specialist Penguin Computing has jumped into the overclocked server fray with a new Altus server aimed at clock-hungry high frequency stock trading applications.

At the HPC on Wall Street Conference in New York City this week, Penguin Computing is showing off its Altus 1750 server, which is built using Advanced Micro Devices’ “Lisbon” Opteron 4100 processors and its homegrown chipsets. The 1U rack-mounted server has three things that companies running high frequency trading systems want: density, low power consumption, and relatively high clock speeds.

Kernel Space

This week sees the start of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which also includes the Android Builders Summit. Held from April 6 – 8 in San Francisco, this invitation-only summit is a gathering of core kernel developers and end users.

The Linux Foundation suggests that Linux is growing well out of adolescence in the commercial world — and says that it will have ‘working group’ announcements that detail the formation of a new group to address more sophisticated enterprise requirements.

Applications

Since the launch of Linux Magazine TV (LMTV) in February of this year, my interest in video has increased beyond any reasonable limits. I’m obsessed with video and our efforts in this new area for us. For weeks I’ve tried to find a way to use my new Panasonic HM-TA1 pocket video camera for new LMTV entries and my own projects. Last week I discovered Cheese Webcam Booth (Cheese), which is the topic of this week’s article. Using Cheese is intuitive and closely resembles the Apple iPad2 Photo Booth app. The difference in price between Cheese (free) and Photo Booth ($499+ for the iPad2) is significant, which definitely gives you something to smile about.

Look, I’ll have to be 100 percent honest here. When asked to write about Viewnior image viewing software application, I didn’t even know that Viewnior existed.
I have been using generic Linux distributions for so many years (eg. Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE), that I really had not even thought about what image viewer Fusion Linux used by default. So basically, I had not even realized it was there and being used by default.

There you go. This article is a thermonuclear geek device, but I think it’s useful. While my personal experience may not be of any use to you, especially if you’ve never tried LaTeX before, I hope this article can intrigue you and prompt you into trying.

The important lessons we’ve learned today are: LaTeX can be pimped into any style you want, sometimes with more freedom and elegance than a typical office suite program. LaTeX is a vast and rich world, with a package for pretty much anything. You can probably clone baby koalas using the right package; it’s unto text what repository is unto Linux. Lastly, you gained simple and quick answers to some common issues that may arise during your LaTeX escapades.

If you have other cases you consider useful and worthy of covering, or maybe questions that still lay around unanswered, then feel free to mail me, and there might yet be a sequel to this article.

Games

Desktop Environments

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC)

The Good
-Appears to have “Download them All” built-in if you enable the KGet settings in the preferences
-Integrates perfectly with KDE
-When you start up a new tab and then click on “recently closed tabs” the list of tabs has thumbnails of the sites. I think this is great because it helps you quickly find the site you’re looking for.

A question that has bugged me for some time, is how we can bring our creations into the hands of more users”, and how we can show the world that a truely open and community developed system can bring great value to more people. How can we overcome the technical barriers that hold back so many people from benefitting from our hard work, all the genius, love and creativity we put into software. Since my first contact with Free software, Linux openSUSE and KDE, we have done some very solid work. We have technically caught up with Microsoft, and are delivering a product that is up to par in many aspects, and better in many more ways. While we have booked immense successes, we have not reached the goal of making the Linux desktop ubiquitous in the desktop market. In a world of iPhones and Android, we even see closed development models based on similar technology as ours being a big success, market-wise, but failing to deliver the full Freedom of a community-driven development model to end users.

KDE Desktop Sharing is also known as the KRFB that is a service stand on the RFB protocol. It is permits the users to share their system with other system of the user.

The process is also helping the users to show their desktop as an administrator to solve their problem. In this regard, the users can get full control to access their desktop. KDE Desktop Sharing is well-matched with all regular RFB and VNC the users.

The other day I needed to find a website. The only thing I could remember was that Vishesh gave me the link in IRC a few days back. So I had to grep through thousands of lines of IRC log which, quite frankly, sucks. Nepomuk should handle this. So what do we have to do to achieve that?

There are times when one might want to disable compositing. Graesslin’s example is in the case of saving battery life. Other’s might be when starting a 3D game or other heavy applications, watching movies, or with older or lower resource machines. For these examples, KWin’s usual method of unredirecting, or disabling composite on a per application basis while the actual effects engine is still running in the background, might be ineffective, counter-productive, or unsupported in a given application. While Alt+Shift+F12 can turn it off, most users don’t know of it or want the hassle of knowing when to use it. So, Graesslin thinks something else should be done.

Let us now take a look at the data we created. For this we will fire up NepSak aka. Nepomukshell and use a bit of SPARQL for testing and debugging purposes (remember: when implementing stuff try to keep to the query API instead of coding your own SPARQL queries).

14 years ago, the KDE community was born with a very bold vision: give to everybody a cool, attractive, easy to use desktop environment, now we are a worldwide community with hundreds of members, we provide a very strong foundation with the kdelibs framework, many apps, the Plasma Desktop workspace and the Plasma Netbook workspace.

GNOME Desktop

Totem for GNOME 3 is available in the GNOME FTP servers. And now onto GNOME 3.2.

There’s a couple of major UI changes planned for Totem 3.2, with designs from the GNOME Design team (and Hylke in particular). These include the removal of the status bar, better fullscreen controls, more contrast when playing movies, etc.

In short, Slackware users are those who want to tinker with their system and don’t find it intimidating — or are willing to face intimidation to learn more about their systems. The users range from hobbyists to one who claims to manage more than 150 Slackware servers across the state. Which isn’t to suggest that Slackware is likely to be a big choice on behalf of business. The Slackware site lists a few companies that offer Slackware support but it doesn’t seem too many organizations are clamoring for it. I contacted Steuben Technologies and Adjuvo Consulting. William Schaub of Steuben Technologies says he’s received only one serious call for Slackware support and says “My guess is either there isn’t a lot of people running Slackware in production or (and this is more likely) that most people running Slackware on their servers have all the help in house that they need.”

The Slackware community may be smaller than those of major Linux distributions, but it’s also largely free of politics and drama (Volkerding’s health scare excepted). The distribution is driven by Volkerding, but it’s not a one-man show. The changelog is full of acknowledgments from Volkerding to Robby Workman, Eric Hameleers, and many others.

You could look at Slackware and say that it’s out of date, a throwback to the days when Linux was the domain of the “l33t” and little more than a hobbyist OS. Another way to look at it is that Slackware is for users who miss the simpler days of Linux and still want to tinker with their systems.

Fedora

Round-up: Fusion Linux is slightly buggy, but a good choice for home users who want everything out of the box and do not want the hassle of adding extra repositories to get codecs and then install them. If Windows gaming on Linux is your thing, this distribution could work for you. If you’re not fussy about disk space and the mix of libraries thrown your way in Fusion, or you are already using Mint and are looking to move or just try out a Fedora base, this could also be interesting. And for advanced users, don’t forget, you can customize the kickstart file from the start as it is availabl

Debian Family

That’s the current load on a Debian mirror in the Netherlands. There are hundreds of Debian mirrors. The last update for Squeeze, the latest release Debian GNU/Linux, was March 19 so much of this traffic will be new installations. Let’s estimate how many installations of Debian GNU/Linux are happening…

Canonical/Ubuntu

That’s not to say there won’t be CDs. We are going to make large numbers of CDs available to the Ubuntu Local Communities (LoCos) through a shipIt-lite program. We are asking the LoCos, who are much better placed than Canonical in many ways, to find creative ways to get CDs to those that need them. And of course, every single person reading this who has a CD is a potential distributor – it is after all free to copy, modify and redistribute. We will also continue to make the packs available through the store which are sold more or less at cost price (plus shipping).

At the end of 2009 I published benchmarks comparing Ubuntu’s 32-bit, 32-bit PAE, and 64-bit Linux kernels. Those tests were carried out to show the performance impact of using 32-bit with PAE (Physical Address Extension) support, which on the plus side allows up to 64GB of system memory to be addressable from 32-bit machines, but is still significantly slower than a 64-bit kernel and user-space. In this article the tests have been carried out on modern hardware and with the latest Ubuntu 11.04 packages to see how the three kernel variants are performing in 2011.

Then we have the file menus, they’re not in the windows like they were in Classic Ubuntu. They’re somewhere else. This is a major headache and retooling for something that’s supposed to be following the style of the classic desktop.

Canonical recently announced the release of Ubuntu 11.04 Beta into the wild, and it has some wondering about the future of the free operating system.

Ubuntu has experienced a very good run. Since it emerged in 2004 as a derivative of the popular Debian GNU/Linux operating system, Ubuntu has made consistent strides to be unique and more than just another Linux distribution. Not only has its popularity as the most widely-used Linux flavor soared, its brand recognition has broken into mainstream tech media and helped develop a more user-friendly image for the free and open source operating system.

The appindicators, global menu, the compiz effects and the Ubuntu Software Center have definitely make Ubuntu Natty a much better version than its predecessor. However, when it comes to the Unity interface, it is really a hate or love affair. Even though I appreciate the work put in by Canonical, but until it becomes more customizable and doesn’t break my productivity flow, I still prefer the Ubuntu Classic interface.

My first impression with the 11.04 desktop was surprisingly positive. I was very much prepared to be underwhelmed, but found quite the opposite to be the case. The Unity desktop ran smooth and was very efficient. After playing with the desktop for a while it becomes quite clear the ultimate goal is that of touch screens. But even being touch-screen-centric, the desktop still works well under the current norm of mouse and keyboard.

When Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu announced that the next version of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity, instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface he shocked the Linux desktop community. Now, with the release of the Ubuntu 11.04 beta, we can get a real look at Unity.

Before going into that though, let me answer the question of why Ubuntu has decided to move from pure GNOME to the GNOME-based Unity. As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, “Lots of people are already committed to Unity–the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors.” In particular, he noted, “Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They’re happy to ship it.”

I am a firm believer being a LoCo is just as much about being friends with your team mates as installing Ubuntu on numerous machines or explaining what OSS/FOSS is all about. At the end of the day we are a community and sometimes that means doing casual non Ubuntu events, these can be added to the LoCo Directory (LD) also. Not every event has to always be about Ubuntu.

Flavours and Variants

Now included in the easy-to-use software, for example, is version 4.1.0 of the Bash shell, replacing the previous version’s Bash 3. Version 4.03 of the Syslinux bootloader replaces Syslinux 3, while the window manager JWM 500 has replaced JWM 493. The included Gnumeric spreadsheet software, meanwhile, has been updated to version 1.10.13.

Qnap Systems announced a four-drive, rackmountable network attached storage (NAS) “TS-412U” server supporting up to 12TB and aimed at the SMB and workgroup markets. In other Linux-based NAS news, Buffalo Systems started shipping its home-focused Pogoplug-based Cloudstor NAS device, which offers free cloud based-storage in addition to up to 2TB local capacity.

Phones

Android

Google has told mobile manufacturers and providers they will have to go through its head honcho to make any changes to the Android mobile operating system.

The Silicon Valley giant has laid down the law to prevent Android becoming more fragmented. Any changes will now have to be approved by the company’s head of mobile, Andy Rubin, according to a report in Business Week.

The Color Nook is a nice little piece of hardware for the price. The screen is crisp and clear, and it’s a great size for carrying around for reading books and light Web browsing. But you can do all that right out of the box — what about when you’ve rooted the Nook?

I decided to go the “Auto Nooter” option to root the Nook so I could install third-party applications, rather than installing a different Android release. The procedure to root the Nook is simple enough. It looks much more complicated on paper (so to speak) than it actually is. So if you’re finding the long list of steps intimidating, don’t worry — it’s a piece of cake. You can root your Nook in about 20 minutes, as long as you have a MicroSD card big enough handy.

Sub-notebooks

The Hercules brand isn’t exactly a household name, but it is better known for the line of speakers than “real” computer equipment. Even so, they’re already onto the next generation of computing with two new eCAFE netbooks.

The EX HD eCAFE netbook is the one that boasts a “real world” battery life of “at least” 13 hours. That should be more than enough to keep you Skyping and Twittering all day long. The Slim HD eCAFE netbook, on the other hand, has a claim to fame with its less than one-inch profile.

Tablets

The question I have been asking myself over the past month is a very simple one, and one which I would guess is being asked by many of the companies making the growing range of of tablet PC devices and the operating systems that drive them: which factors will decide which companies come out on top in the long run and can we learn anything from the history of the PC?

In the PC world it was the relentless pursuit of global domination by Microsoft that ensured that Windows ended up as the de-facto desktop operating system for almost the entire globe. There were a couple of other factors in play and of those, the ability of Windows to run on hardware built by multiple manufacturers was probably the most important of the lot.

NASDAQ has placed its Linux-based IT systems at the front of an $11.3 billion (£7 billion) effort to thwart a merger between the New York Stock Exchange and Deutsche Borse.

The high-tech stock market is teaming up with InterContinentalExchange in an attempt to acquire NYSE Euronext from under the nose of Deutsche Borse, which only last month announced it was the approved bidder for the exchange.

The GOsa open source infrastructure management project has been forked with version 1.0 of FusionDirectory being released today.

In February some GOsa developers decided to fork the project in order to provide better documentation; develop “the most powerful and universal” tool for IT management; and provide “more flexibility for development tools”.

A while back, Mark Webb of the Met Office Hadley Centre for climate change described in a guest post, how his Cloud model project COSP introduced a governance model, based on one of our templates. This was a result of few informal chats over beers and his exploration of OSS Watch public resources. Mark also described some of the immediate benefits they experienced.

The selection of operating systems was once one of the major decisions IT managers had to face when considering their options for service delivery, be it for servers or desktops. Until a decade or so ago, such choices were limited to choosing one from a range of proprietary operating systems supplied by vendors. But the past 10 years have witnessed a new option take hold in the form of open source operating systems. What drives the selection process when choosing between open source software and operating systems supplied by a vendor?

Web Browsers

Mozilla

It was supposed to be an effort that was going to propel Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client to the same level of adoption and interest as Firefox.

It failed.

Three years later, Thunderbird and Mozilla Messaging have not lived up to the initial hope of Mozilla Messaging. I don’t think that Mozilla Messaging ever achieved the market adoption they hoped for and I don’t think they ever figured out a revenue model either.

SaaS

For Linux vendor Red Hat (NYSE:RHT), the cloud isn’t about any one particular project, it’s about a combination of multiple open source projects.

At the core of Red Hat’s cloud strategy is its Cloud Foundations effort which extends Red Hat’s infrastructure offerings for the cloud.

“Cloud Foundations was named that for a reason,” Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of the Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat told InternetNews.com. “The evolution to improving IT infrastructure is a continuous process and you’re never really done.”

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice/Symphony

While it’s clear we were and are the continuation of the OpenOffice project judging both by the numbers of contributors who have switched from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice and by our manifesto itself, we also gained quite a few brand new people. I have the feeling that at least for some of them, they do not identify well with the notion that we are continuing some other project but would rather think of LibreOffice as something brand new (irrelevant of any technological arguments).

Education

I know, I know, I have been on and off this bike more times than I care to remember. My associates have warned me saying that’s it’s just another tease and I should stick with sensible software… but this time I am sure it’s the real thing.

We met many years ago but somehow things just kept fizzling out; was it the odd pet names we used?… like Moodle, Gimp and Puppy, I don’t know, but I at least I never caught anything nasty apart from a brush with the karambas and some painful widgets.

Business

Semi-Open Source

BSD

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

Making phone calls for free is one of the things made possible by the Internet that is more useful to all people, regardless of how much they like or dislike computers. Computer-based free phone calls make possible to stay in contact with relatives living thousands of kilometers away or to set up phone conferences without any special telephone equipment or contract.

Regardless of costs and of which software is used, computer based telephony seems also great for hearing impaired people. As software phone user said: “for the first time in years, I’m actually enjoying talking to others using a (computer) phone.

Government

This year has seen an increasing focus on the use by free and open source software (“FOSS”) by governments with recent announcements by the UK, the Australian Federal Government and NASA. FOSS projects and companies need to be aware of these efforts because of the scope of the opportunity to transform government and provide less expensive software infrastructure to government. Governments are also a very large market for software. Yet governments continue to be hampered by their habits of using proprietary software as demonstrated by the recent decision by an administrative court in Lille, France. http://lawandlifesiliconvalley.com/blog/?p=584 .

Unfortunately the “27 weeks or more” category increased slightly in March to 6.122 million workers (about 4% of the labor force). This remains extremely high, and long term unemployment remains a serious problem.

LIKE everyone else, government officials want to look good. That often leads them to enact policies that promote favorable movements in the indexes by which they are judged. But when those indexes are imperfect, bad choices often result. And that’s nowhere more evident than in economic policy.

That Aug. 20, Commerzbank of Germany borrowed $350 million at the Fed’s discount window. Two days later, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and the Wachovia Corporation each received $500 million. As collateral for all these loans, the banks put up a total of $213 billion in asset-backed securities, commercial loans and residential mortgages, including second liens.

Understand this precisely: This was not a case of slipshod handling, of sloppy paperwork, or bad management. This was a willful decision to break the law in order to save expenses and be more profitable.

In other words, if you screw up the process of securitizing mortgages by failing to assign the loan note (and/or physically keep track of it), you lose the right to subsequently foreclose in the event of a default.

In general, seniors vote Republicans and poor people don’t. So the easy play for Paul Ryan was clear: limit the entitlement-reform portion of his budget to slashing Medicaid. Then he could say he was taking a first step on entitlements without enraging the GOP’s core supporters.

He didn’t do that. Ryan — and the GOP — are proposing to privatize Medicare. They’re proposing to save money by giving seniors less than their now-private Medicare will cost. They’re endorsing a plan that is the single least popular option for balancing the budget — below raising the retirement age, cutting defense spending or raising taxes on the rich.

Outside of Washington, people have a different conception of bravery. After all, over the last three decades the policies crafted in Washington have led to the most massive upward redistribution in the history of the world. The richest 1 percent of the population has seen is share of national income increase by close to 10 percentage points. This comes to $1.5 trillion a year, or as Representative Ryan might say, $90 trillion over the next 75 years. That’s almost $300,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

Citibank will soon start clearing customer checks in a way that minimizes the potential for multiple overdraft charges.

In an internal memo sent Monday, the bank said it will process checks starting with the smallest amounts first as of July 25. Most large banks process larger checks first, a practice consumer advocates say increases the potential for multiple overdraft violations on checking accounts.

Customers are being notified of the change in statements this week.

Privacy

Data retention has been rejected as unconstitutional in the Czech republic. The EU Directive, pushed forward by the UK, creates an obligation to store everyone’s traffic data, such as who you email or call on your phone, for possible use in criminal investigations.

The Protection of Freedom Bill introduces a number of measures to help protect our fundamental right to privacy, particularly creating new Commissioners to deal with biometrics and CCTV, but did not seek to address many of the long-standing complaints about current protections.

Well, that pretty much sums up the feelings of one Lindsay Lohan, who is mulling a lawsuit against Kamofie & Co. after surveillance footage of her allegedly absconding with a necklace has been released into the wild.

Civil Rights

The White House’s IP czar Victoria Espinel is calling on Congress to further expand and toughen U.S. intellectual property law, which is already among the most sweeping and strictest in the world. Copyright regulation has grown into a massive and complicated bureaucratic system, which has lost sight of it purpose and limits. The capture of this Administration and key members of Congress by the powerful special interests called Big Content continues to grow as demonstrated by this report, which fails to address the need for a balanced reform approach.

Internet/Net Neutrality/UBB

techflaws.org alerted us to an Ars Technica piece about the wonderful illusory world of Time Warner Cable’s CEO, Glenn Britt, and his prediction about how we, the people, will eventually learn to want to pay more for our broadband.

DRM

The manager of acquisitions for Halifax Public Libraries says she is not buying new e-book licenses from HarperCollins after the publisher increased the price of digital editions.

HarperCollins used to offer unlimited lending on each e-book license but since the beginning of March the company has changed the policy. It now requires libraries to repurchase licenses after a limited number of uses.

Intellectual Monopolies

Copyrights

Which is why artist after artist is abandoning the Record Labels and the Publishers to go it alone. It’s sad to see these companies in trouble. But it was inevitable.

And this has those companies terrified. This is why they are screaming for Bill C-32 to be passed in Canada. It’s the companies that want it, not the artists. My guess is that they hope to use it as a springboard for further legislation, which would halt or slow the migration of the artists towards the better option.

Thousands of accused BitTorrent downloaders – including those of The Hurt Locker – can breathe a sigh of relief as their cases have been dropped. In what can be described as a major victory for those targeted, the complicated nature of these mass-lawsuits has forced the copyright holders to dump nearly all the defendants and rethink their strategy. Slowly, it appears that the US Copyright Group’s campaign to turn piracy into profit is crumbling.

If you know how, it is possible within just a few mouse clicks to have free access to one of the world’s largest resources of free music. Millions of tracks are available for free streaming but, with a few tweaks and the right software, they can be easily downloaded. The industry, seemingly powerless to do anything about the powerful source of the music, prefers to destroy the toolmakers – by fair means or foul.

But all of this ignores the main point: that the basic methodology he used for any of those calculations wasn’t sound. People aren’t complaining about the results. They’re complaining about the methodology itself. And he doesn’t seem to get that at all because he doesn’t defend it at all.

The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again